Tag Archives: character design

Seeing all the great Daughters of The Eyrewood fanart linked on Twitter made me want to do my own version, plus I just got Manga Studio 5 and it seemed like a good way to practice using the program. Everyone seems to be drawing their DOTE lasses with long hair, and for some reason I kept thinking of a girl with short, honey-colored hair.

The problem: I wanted to do a quick color sketch, but “quick” and “learning to use new software” do not go together AT ALL. As simple as this is, it took forever because I couldn’t get used to the pressure sensitivity settings in Manga Studio 5. Maybe I need to adjust my Cintiq’s settings, but the line thickness was all over the place and it wasn’t looking good. Eventually I just used a tool with no pressure sensitivity, which is kind of a shame.

On the whole I’m loving Manga Studio and what it can do, but right now I’m really bad at using it. I’d like to do another piece of this character, only this time a full-body pose and (*crosses fingers*) with pressure sensitivity for better lineart.

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I know I really shouldn’t be tagging things as “Sketchblog” when they aren’t really sketches, but meh– tagging them “Finished Colored Character Designblog” would sound stupid, so we’ll all just have to make do.

This gal started out as a doodle in a graph paper notebook that I really liked, and for some reason her design just screamed “pink!” to me, so I colored her in a range of pinks and purples. At first I tried making the boots the same yellow that I used for the trim and some of the accessories and it looked awful– I don’t know what it is about yellow, but it’s a color that doesn’t seem to play well with others. I’m not sure if these are going to be her final colors, but at least this is basically what I had in mind for her palette.

Right now, I think she could be a good friend for Riorla— Strip Search Home Edition has caused me to dust off some of my comic ideas and look at them in a new light, and while I’m not sure if I’m going to end up using Maylee in a comic, she’s still a lot of fun to draw. Her hair’s got a Medusa–thing going on; it looked much more like tentacles in the rough sketch, but I toned that down here…because pink tentacles just look so WRONG. Not that it can’t be done well, I guess? Maybe? Color beguiles me.

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From the frequency I post drawings lately, you’d think I wasn’t doing much drawing. Actually it’s quite the opposite, but most of my drawings are perhaps best left alone in my sketchbook…not because they’re bad, but because a lot of what I’m doing is really rough stuff that doesn’t look finished at all. Which is probably how it should be; I think I used to waste way too much time in the past trying to make stuff that looked like a finished piece that I could post on a website and not enough time, you know, drawing.

I keep drawing this girl with twin tails and a simple, polka-dotted dress in my sketchbooks for some reason, so I figured I’d fire up ye olde tablet and try to draw her that way. One of the things I’ve realized lately is that I get upset that stuff doesn’t come out the way I want on the tablet, but I don’t spend that much time just sketching on it. Too often, I go to the tablet to try to produce something finished after doing all the sketches on paper; it’s not really surprising that it’s taking a long time to warm up to the tablet if I never just use it casually.

So here’s a super-simple Sunday sketch blog for you; nothing amazing, but it was fun to draw and I think the doggy is cute. I actually need to use some reference material to practice drawing animals like dogs and horses, but for a quick little effort like this I think he’s fine– you can tell he’s a dog, right? I mean, what else would he be?

Looking at it now I see her legs are a little weird, and that’s an issue with the tablet– I have to zoom in to draw the black lines, and then I have trouble seeing if stuff looks right/ is in proportion. I’m definitely going to be looking out for that going forward.

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On Twitter, Peter Simetti, president of Alterna Comics, has been posting a bunch of sketches lately, including many of the X-Men. That made me think, “Hey, I like the X-Men and I draw pictures, lemme get in on some of that!”

So I drew Jean Grey, she of the ridiculous aerobics costume and terrible codename. Her ’90s outfit was pretty much the worst example of costume design from that era, but I love it because I grew up with it, so THERE! I’m just happy I drew something cartoony that seems to have worked; lately whenever I try to go cartoony instead of detailed, it just looks bad.

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This is a character who was meant to appear in Sterling, but i kept pushing her appearance back, and in the end she never appeared– well, she was on the other end of a phone conversation, but I don’t think that really counts. More importantly, this little character sketch is one of the first images I ever colored on the computer, so I was incredibly impressed with it back in the day. It looks grainy because I don’t have the original file anymore– I just have a scan of a really old inkjet printout, which I think I printed out at school.

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This was the first drawing I did of the Knight of Sterling, who is obviously related to the Sterling comic. How exactly, I cannot say (whooooooooooo.)

I really love the look of medieval armor, and I wanted to do a version of it that looked feminine without being completely impractical- as in, closer to actual armor than an armored bathing suit. I think I’ve drawn around 6,037 versions of the Knights armor at this point, with all sorts of different options, but they all look something like this.

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This was an image of another character who kind of got sucked into Dark Juice Box, in fact I don’t think she even does whatever it is she’s shown doing here anymore. It’s kind of an artifact from a lost project, but I still kind of like it.

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Naia is one of many characters from a fantasy project called Dark Juice Box that I fiddle with now and again. I love DJB, but I’ve never come to a consensus of opinion about what I want to do with it- even if time weren’t an issue, I don’t know if I’d really want to do it as a comic. It might work okay as one of those tween-oriented novels with illustrations, but I’ve tried writing it as prose and it doesn’t seem to work. Meanwhile, it’s spawning more and more characters, and the mythology is getting more and more involved, so it’s going to have to go SOMEWHERE, someday.